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For some reason, your web server (Apache) is serving the HTML file with a character encoding of "UTF-16 (Little-endian)" Quite why it should want to do that is utterly beyond me, and I think it's giving firefox a major-league headache. This is not a newb problem

This might be relevant: how did you edit the html file, and how did you get it onto the web server?

Completely unrelated: there's a couple of minor glitches in your CSS:

Code:

body {background color: white;
...

That should be "background-color: white" (note the hyphen)

Code:

font-family: verdana, tahoma, trebuchet ms;

Font names with spaces in them should be quoted:

Code:

font-family: verdana, tahoma, "trebuchet ms";

I'm absolutely certain that this is not the cause of your main problems.

Basically, if the web server sends the page and the style sheet with different character-encodings, and doesn't include character-encoding HTTP headers on both, Moz gets confused (presumably it's assuming that the CSS has the same encoding as the page, unless told otherwise).

I'm not surprised, and I don't really blame moz (much) - that's a really EEEEEVIL thing to do to a browser. IE probably only copes due to its longstanding habit of sniffing the content of incoming files and treating them like what they appear to be, rather than what the webserver said they were. Either that or it just assumes ISO-whatever unless told otherwise.

clechner: I can't see any reason you'd want to do this (you don't have any non-english-language content lurking in the site do you? In fact, to need UTF-16, it would probably have to be non-roman-alphabet, even) If not, I reckon your webserver is mis-configured. Have words with the webserver admin.

[Aha! it's fixed. No more evil UTF-16 (LE) content encoding headers, and it all works]

i don't know what the rules on this board are for language, but i'm pretty sure i'm going to be violating it in the next line.

**** CUTEFTP.... and if that gets blocked, PHOOK CUTEFTP...

ok, very sorry about that. CuteFTP was doing "something" when it was uploading the files.

bascially, i took those pages, did a view source, then copied it to Notepad again, saved the pages, and then uploaded the "new" version with WS_FTP... miraculously it worked.

the strange thing is, i admin'd a different website with Cute for quite a while, same version of Cute, on the same box, same install. surely it was a setting within Cute (that i searched and search for and couldn't find). wtf....

anyway, that's the answer and it's very very strange. thanks for your help guys.... when blufive asked when/how i upload/change content i thought it might be something strange like that. strangely, when i loaded the webpages in cute's web-editor (which i don't use, but it offers a notepad view) it didn't come up right, but it did everywhere else. i knew at that point it might be something with Cute.

and BlueFive, holy crap, there's no way you should be able to find that minute of a detail.... HATS OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! very cool..... thanks for the help again... you have no idea how insanely crazy i was (or maybe you do.......)...

Having taken the CSS apart line-by-line, I realized that Firefox was just ignoring the stylesheet altogether. At which point, long experience told me to start looking at the HTTP headers. And then the UTF-16 character encoding leapt out at me, cos that's REALLY odd for an english-language page.